Playing To Win:
Pazz & Jop's Fifth (or Sixth) Year of the Woman

No use seeking hidden meanings in the 20th or 21st Pazz Jop Critics'
Poll. The story is smack dab on the surface, there for the kvelling
and the selling--self-evident and significant, heartening and thrilling,
unprecedented and maybe even sexy. Liz Phair--the first female victor
since Joni Mitchell in 1974, when the 24-person electorate consisted
largely of my friends--is joined on the album chart by 11 other
women, recording under their own sobriquets or fronting bands that
usually include more women. With PJ Harvey scoring twice, and the
Digable Planets and Yo La Tengo granted half-credits for Ladybug
and Georgia Hubley, that's 13 and two halves records all told, and
though in 1992 we had 10 and two halves, then women garnered a mere
one (and a half) of the top 10, whereas in 1993 they scored three
of the top four. On the traditionally distaff singles chart, where
the gender breakdown is unremarkable, the Breeders follow Tracy
Chapman in 1988 and Laurie Anderson in 1981 to the top spot. Björk's
"Human Behaviour" came in second on our video ballot, following
Cyndi Lauper in 1984, and "Cannonball" rode in fourth on a goofy
clip codirected by better half Kim Gordon. Rap-rockers Luscious
Jackson follow Lucinda Williams in 1989 as EP winners. Only on the
reissue list, where Columbia's proudly feminist Janis Joplin box
finished seventh in an otherwise male field, did guys still rool.

Needless to say, skepticism is always justified when journalists
crow about trends. Note that as recently as 1991, the only women
to place were Bonnie Raitt, Sam Phillips, and Kirsty MacColl, and
note also that this is hardly Pazz & Jop's first Year of the
Woman. We had one in 1992; we had one in 1988; we had one in 1981,
when women put ten and three halves albums in the top 40; hell,
we thought we had one in 1979, when 10th-place Donna Summer, now
cited as an example of how critics only respect sexually assertive
white women, led seven (and three halves) female artists
onto our chart. And as was noted by many of our 309 respondents--a
new high, as were the 68 female voters, their numbers swelled by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton Memorial Poobah Ann Powers's affirmative-action
effort and H.L. Mencken Memorial Poobah Joe Levy's insistence on
declaring our deadlines a disaster area--the women on our
chart are as varied as the men. (Almost, anyway--none of them is
as big a creep as Dwight Yoakam, not to mention Dr. Dre.) I'll grant
you that 68th-place diva Toni Braxton and 47th-place sexpot Janet
Jackson deserved more respect, that icons on the order of Sinéad
and what's-her-name were nowhere in evidence, and that we got no
riot grrrls either (although Bikini Kill's Joan Jett-produced "Rebel
Girl" was tied just below chart level with seven other singles that
would have toned up an already healthily non-album-dependent list).
But despite all that, we cover a lot of territory; I mean, from
Sade's velvet wallpaper and Aimee Mann's power-pop singer-songwriting
to Rosanne Cash's mainstream privatism and Jane Siberry's eccentric
privatism to Carol van Dijk's Euroneotraditionalist lead work and
Laetitia Sadier's Euroexperimental front work to Me'Shell NdegeOcello's
people's poetry and Cassandra Wilson's art of improvisation seems
like a lot to me. And Phair at number one, PJ Harvey at three, and
the Breeders at four (plus Belly at 37) represent a sea change.

I'm not forgetting that Harvey and the all-female L7 burst upon
us in a 1992 that was topped by the half-credited Arrested Development.
And I'm down with the profusion of comments on the varieties of
female experience. But I still think that the big story in 1993
was girls learning to play a boys' game by boys' rules, and play
it to win. Sade and Mann and Siberry and Cash and Me'Shell and Wilson
and van Dijk and Sadier all fit established female niches
that critics appreciate. It's not impossible to imagine a poll-topping
successor to Joni's Court and Spark emanating from a leader-plus-backup
like van Dijk's Bettie Serveert, even from a singer-songwriter who
combined Siberry's singularity with Mann's thralldom to the hook.
Not impossible--just damned hard. I believe that Blondie's 1978
Parallel Lines was a more incandescent explosion than
the poll-topping This Year's Model, that the
McGarrigles' 1977 Dancer With Bruised Knees was a tougher
statement than Never Mind the Bollocks, but I wouldn't waste
time electioneering for either. I know all too well that in practice,
our poll honors music that parades its mastery of meaning, and that
in practice this comes down to bands, whether ad hoc creations like
Paul Simon's Graceland hirelings, De La Soul's voice-and-tape
fantasias, and Prince's multitracked versions of his multitalented
self or old-fashioned tour-bus brawlers like the Clash, E Street,
Crazy Horse, and Nirvana--whether ad hoc studio creations like Phair
and friends or old-fashioned tour-bus brawlers like PJ Harvey or
hybrids like Belly and the Breeders.

In short, what we have here is the consummation a lot of male critics
said they were waiting for--not women who could play their axes
or anything stupid like that, just women who knew how to come
on strong. This is basically the musical bias the Brits call
rockism, a promethean schema that valorizes the artist as creative
actor. From Van Morrison at 55 to Mick Jagger at 110, from Donald
Fagen at 43 to John Cougar Mellencamp at 93, from Elvis Costello
at 57 to Sting at 65--hell, from John Hiatt at 38 to Billy Joe Shaver
at 38 (hell and tarnation, from Kate Bush at 65 to Rickie Lee Jones
at 106)--old-timers of all ages still strive proudly to fufill this
ideal. But it's no longer the fine strapping hegemony it used to
be, and not just among fad-hopping U.K. pomo-poppers. What does
it mean, for instance, that three of our most aged white male finishers--Jimmie
Dale Gilmore (seventh), Willie Nelson (22nd), and Bob Dylan (23rd)--devoted
themselves to other people's songs? Or that after years of traditionalist
resistance, the Pet Shop Boys--whose three previous entries finished
22nd, 32nd, and 35th--should leapfrog to fifth on their poorest-selling
disc? Above all, what does it mean that after years of posing atop
Mount Caucasus, torch aloft and eagle at liver, U2 should finish
ninth with a damn Eno album?

For good reason, the rockist vision is often attacked as Euro, male
chauvinist, and so forth--as an aestheticization of the will to
dominance. Yet oddly enough, while rockism continues to define metal
and fuels many of the new male country singers, two of its bulwarks
these days are rap (pardon me, hip hop) and the former Amerindie
subculture still sometimes labeled alternative, both of which reject
or redefine virtuosity while championing their own modes of rugged
mastery. As so often happens in countercultures, it's like hippie
all over again: in order to combat the ruling class, the media,
the powers that be, the establishment, the man, both rappers
and alternative rockers lay claim to an individualistic ethosthey believe has been homogenized out of existence. Big on authenticity
and creative control, they carry the rockist flag. But not without
misgivings. Reluctant to cross over yet desperate to get paid, reliving
African trickster and griot traditions as they act out against absent
fathers, forced by the forces of censure and censorship to front
about how literal they are, rappers suffer ugly doubts about their
own autonomy. And the indie guys, who reject rockist ideology while
embodying its aesthetic, don't have it so simple either. They'd
be confused about gender privilege even if their girlfriends didn't
hock them about it.

When Nevermind overwhelmed Billboard first and Pazz
& Jop later in 1991, we all knew "alternative" was in for weird
times, but except for some feminist critics, notably the Seattle-born
Powers, few considered gender consequences in the year of
Raitt-Phillips-MacColl.
Who would have figured? Yet here we are. Say there are 12 Amerindie
bands in our top 40, and nine in our top 20: Dinosaur Jr., Belly,
Uncle Tupelo, Yo La Tengo, American Music Club, the Afghan Whigs,
Urge Overkill, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, the Breeders, Nirvana,
and Liz Phair. Since not one of these bands records for a fully
independent label, this list is deeply debatable; maybe it's wrong
to exclude long-ago Twin/Tone stalwart Paul Westerberg, and I count
Pearl Jam only because . . . I forgot. Still, bear with
me. Seven of the 12 are first-time album finishers, but not one
of the four male newcomers--Uncle Tupelo, the Afghan Whigs, Urge
Overkill, and Smashing Pumpkins--scored with a debut album. All
came up in the indie farm system, where all recorded at least two
albums/EPs. A version of the Breeders that included Belly's (then
Throwing Muses') Tanya Donelly released a Rough Trade album in 1990
and a 4AD/Elektra EP in 1992. But Liz Phair and Belly charted true
debut records, which added to Digable Planets, Me'Shell, and Netherindies
Bettie Serveert makes five, all showcasing women, on a chart that
averages around eight--with Exile in Guyville, which predated
the Atlantic deal critic-bashing former Pazz & Jopper Gerard
Cosloy cut for his poll-vaulting Matador label, our only genuine
Amerindie album.

Nor is it just the numbers that tell me women are now the prime
hope of a onetime youth culture whose length of tooth is measured
by the 1986 and 1988 debuts of Overkill and the Whigs. It's my ears.
Although I didn't resist Exile in Guyville, I did find it
hard to hear through the word-of-mouth, just as Nirvana's number-two
In Utero was hard to hear through the media clamor
(in my defense I'll say that two decades ago it took me just as
long to penetrate Exile on Main Street, which I promise not
to mention again). When I gave myself the Christmas present of relistening
in depth, however, the voters' choices ended up my favorite new music
of 1993, and Guyville started sounding like a full-fledged
classic.

If you wanted to get wise, you could grouse that Guyville
shares all too much with Court and Spark, but you'd be jiving.
Where Joni's winner was a produced, listener-friendly variation
on the audaciously arty For the Roses, Phair's recalls
the more tentative Clouds--except that it's realized and
Clouds isn't, proof positive that minimalism lives. Phair
milks drummer-coproducer Brad Wood (who kicks things off with a
perfect Bill Wyman bass hook) and multitracks with Princely panache,
adding simple, self-taught, alternative guitar noises--strums and
riffs rather than Nirvana/Sonic Youth noise-a-rama--where
he-who-cannot-be-named
would lay in a beatwise panoply. By the time I'd heard the 18 songs
18 times, I was hooked right down to the perverse slow ones--like
"Canary," which follows a minute of halting piano with a sad ditty
whose mix of domestic detail and attempts at cooperative cohabitation
climaxes quietly with a house on fire. Clearly, Phair wanted to
prove she could do it with a band and prove she could do it without
one; substitute "guy" for "band" and you'll know why. Not
only does she have another album in her, she has a career in her,
one she's canny enough to stay on top of. But at the same time she's
alternative-rockist enough to look askance at careers undertaken
exclusively from behind closed doors. So her next step is to get
out of the studio and start a band. Since this leader-plus-backup
is unlikely to bog down in participatory democracy, I just hope
Phair figures out how to generate the requisite synergy anyway,
and noting that the four musicians credited on her record are fulltime
citizens of Guyville, submit that a female player might shake
up the dynamics.

For I also note that of the three other women's bands, PJ Harvey,
which consists of Polly Harvey and two guys from Somerset who knew
a genius when they saw one, is at once the most accomplished
and the most conventional--a blues-based power trio who, like Nirvana,
hired critic-bashing former Pazz & Jopper, alternative ideologue,
and sexist dweeb Steve Albini to guarantee the hard-edged power-as-integrity
they demanded in a followup. Albini's input was pitiless and extreme,
and although the device of turning some levels so low that listeners
have to choose between not hearing the record or playing it loud
is what insiders call a "stupid gimmick," I go along with the consensus
that Rid of Me is realer than the 35th-place 4-Track Demos.
I prefer it to Belly's Star and the Breeders' Last Splash,
too, and not just for its passion--hybrids who recorded before they
played out, Belly and the Breeders aren't all there yet musically.
Yet live, Star's mystofemmes are postmacho masters of their
own pre-Amerindie pastiche, while Last Splash is simply the
most outlandish record ever to make our top five. Take as a metaphor
the tumble-bumble number-one single "Cannonball," which is either
alternative's "Horse With No Name" or the revenge of the shambolic--proof
the garage lives creatively, commercially, and in all the erogenous
zones in between. Unlike the Pixies or PJ Harvey, the Deal twins
don't equate guitars with virtuosity or expressive display, and
if they're too messy by me, the voters took their loose ends as
proof of a righteous impulse worth loving and rewarding.

And at least Last Splash made the Dean's List--down in the
50s, stranded in a vast expanse of nonfinishers. Where before world-beat
and college radio my lists often anticipated the consensus, recently
their correspondence to the general wisdom has been random--my first
would be the voters' 87th, my fourth their 32nd, my ninth their
eighth, my 38th their fourth. This year, however, the pattern was
different. Rarely have I concurred so thoroughly on the cream--four
of the voters' top eight are in my top seven, nine of their top
17 in my top 18. But not one of the 23 records below that--and only
two of a typically varied 41-50 that goes Spinanes, Henry Threadgill,
Donald Fagen, Counting Crows, Björk, Mekons, Janet
Jackson, Pharcyde, Suede, Velvet Underground--made my year-end A
list. Most of the voters' choices were solid and smart, worthy of
honor or at least mention; from Dwight Yoakam to Cassandra Wilson,
I might have missed a few altogether without the P&J seal of
approval. But they're almost all by Yanks. And while the chauvinism
wasn't as unremitting as in 1992, when PJ Harvey and Morrissey were
the only aliens on our chart, I find the census discouraging: the
only non-Americans are Harvey, perennials U2/Sade/Pet Shop Boys,
major-label freshpersons Stereolab, and Amsterdam Anglophones Bettie
Serveert.

Although under the sexual circumstances I cherished hopes for 62nd-place
Zap Mama, this is not a plea for "world music"--most of my African
and Caribbean (and Central Asian) finds were strikingly archival.
So forget Third World outreach--I would have settled for Anglophilia.
Because in this particular year of the woman, I found the oblique
genderfucks of the Popinjays and Saint Etienne and the self-contained
dream-pop of Ireland's Cranberries and Michigan Anglomorphs His
Name Is Alive more pregnant with meaning than the arty variations
on womanist expressionism served up by Mann, Siberry, and Me'Shell.
When expressionism works it's the shit. Mud-wrestling with chaos,
cutting their rage with conscious grotesquery and indignant self-deprecation,
Kurt Cobain, Polly Harvey, and Greg Dulli give irony the arm without
denying themselves its out. In contrast, crooner-poemwriter concrète
Mark Eitzel, one-trick guitar god J Mascis, Music Row status symbol
John Hiatt, recovering outlaw Billy Joe Shaver, Oprah volunteer
Eddie Vedder, and Prince surrogate Terence Trent D'Arby all express
too much, methinks. Yet though their moments rarely become minutes
and their minutes never become hours, all have parlayed identifiable
styles, discernible smarts, and reliable personas into serious Stateside
reps. Meanwhile, a straight U.K. band's gay-identified U.K. record
affects a pathos so flamboyant that reasonable people can't stand
it--until the songs climb into bed with them. In Britain, Suede
wins a Mercury Music Prize. In Rolling Stone, it's "Hype
of the Year." And in Pazz & Jop, it finishes 49th--better than
it might have, worse than it deserved, and at least it deflected
repressed homophobia from the Pet Shop Boys.

Although the shortfall may be random, to me Suede's showing seems
emblematic of Amerindie provincialism. With its naturalization of
fashion, hype, indirection, androgyny, and Jacques Brel, Brit music
culture is now so far removed from America's alternative mindset
that the poor guys might as well be performing Bulgarian folk songs.
But provincialism begins at home. Were I to kvetch that of the 16
votes for Suede, nine came from New York and California and only
two from Middle America, Midwesterners could respond that of the
18 votes for St. Louis fiddle-and-steel band Uncle Tupelo, nine
came from Middle America and only four from New York and California.
So as with Suede, I'd listen a lot and get it eventually. There's
something smartly posthomespun there, though not enough--I'd like
more lyrics on the order of "Name me a song that everybody knows/I
bet you it belongs to Acuff-Rose." On the other hand, I'm not always
so sure what Suede's songs mean either, and if a Minnesotan were
to claim that our differences came down to dialect--that camp and
falsetto are indigenous to one place, banjo and drawl to another--I'd
have trouble mounting a convincing counterargument. As discrete
monads segregate themselves into subsubcultures determined by geography
and sensibility, battening down the hatches from Compton to Croatia,
the fine old liberal myth about music dissolving boundaries is showing
its bullshit quotient.

As you might have guessed, it is with rap that segregation becomes
most problematic, although this time it may be less characteristic
of consumers than critics, with formerly tolerant white worrywarts
on one side and populists and rap specialists on the other. Dr.
Dre didn't get near the victory some scaredy-cats predicted was
his for the drive-by. But having fretted that gangstas were cordoning
off their own market niche like the heavy metal kids of yore, I
obviously never imagined that The Chronic, a late-'92 album
that picked up all of 10 points last year, would finish a triple-platinum
sixth in our 1993 poll. Still, Dre's triple-platinum partner in
profit Snoop Doggy Dogg was only 52nd, and the tenor of the few
progangsta comments suggested considerable support in the fact-of-nature,
sound-of-the-streets, and guilty-pleasure categories. And though
the tough-talking Latinos of Cypress Hill were 29th, voters generally
preferred the alternative: De La Soul, Digable Planets, A Tribe
Called Quest, and Me'Shell, all whom explored jazzy beats that signified
bohemia as much as they did great black music. I don't exempt myself
from this tendency--after a year of prayer and meditation, I've
learned to loathe The Chronic. But I much prefer De La's
dislocated funk and the Digables' hard-bop hooks to the cocktail-flavored
groove of 82nd-place Guru, Me'Shell, even Quest, and would single
out for praise the alternative/metal-rap of the 60th-place Judgment
Night soundtrack, which attempts to suture cultural lacerations
more patient-appropriately.

Dave Marsh leads off the "Gangsta Bitching" section with a typically
passionate outburst that's also typically, shall we say, overstated.
The facts are these. Between 1988, when It Takes a Nation of
Millions To Hold Us Back announced hip hop's rockist agenda,
and 1992, when 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of . . .
became our third rap winner in five years, we've averaged two
black albums a year in the top five, three in the top 10, and 10
in the top 40. But by "black," I mean "featuring an artist of African
descent." This makes sense to me; anyone who doesn't think Vernon
Reid or Tracy Chapman is "really" black should try and imagine saying
so to their faces. Others might counter, however, that a black album
can only be one that attracts a substantial black audience, which
also makes sense. Then our black numbers go down, although not that
much--unless you want to argue that the black audience for Prince
and P.M. Dawn and Arrested Development isn't "black enough." These
calculations do get tricky--and risk unseemly racial presumption
in the bargain.

We can safely say this much, however: 1993 is the first year that
there hasn't been a black album in the top five since 1985, when
Artists United Against Apartheid earned only a half. And if we can
also project that this will prove an exception rather than a trend,
we can nevertheless see why Marsh is so upset. Because make no mistake,
bohemia is a trend, from Digable Planets and Me'Shell NdegeOcello
to Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair. Bohemia is a function of class,
a concept that in this context encompasses cultural style as much
as gross income; it's hostile to the merely popular in ways both
stupid and smart. Marsh, who voted for Pearl Jam as well as Dr.
Dre and has always trumpeted working-class taste and rockist expressionism
over collegiate exclusivity and pomo irony, hates bohemians for
reasons he would argue are fundamentally political, and even those
who would beg to differ will grant that politics is hardly a specialty
of this year's boho crop. Where in 1992 we heard nonstop propaganda
from John Trudell and the Disposable Heroes and heavy protest from
Arrested Development, Neneh Cherry, even Sonic Youth and Leonard
Cohen, 1993 never gets more ideological than Me'Shell, Digable Planets,
and, jeeze, the Pet Shop Boys. For some, this leaves Dr. Dre in
the symbolic position of embodying our inarticulate collective rage.
I say he's not good enough for the job. In fact, I say he's not
angry enough.

Yet however much our women pussyfoot around the four-syllable F-word,
however heavy they come down on the inward, they do represent a
power shift, and power shifts are what politics is about. It's my
(male) belief that the progress this shift will effect is unlikely
to nudge, much less dislodge, the entrenched economic interests
exploiting gangsta pathology, although it might palliate some symptoms.
Nor do I expect international sisterhood to cut into an America-firstism
that could get real tedious real soon. And let me note that as a
longtime bohemian hanger-on, I'm appalled to witness in one year
the returns of Tim Buckley (in the voice of his EP-charting son)
and El Topo (a dreadful fillum revived as the dumbest video
ever to top our poll). But none of the above is to suggest that
Liz Phair represents anything less than a long overdue and exceptionally
happy development in an exercise that teaches me something new every
year. Male critics said they were waiting for it, and they were.
Now they get to find out how much they like the consequences.